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Victoria Darlington
This is a work in progress, an unfinished application. Please leave it be. Personality Victoria is a dreamer and an explorer. She longs to learn, and she longs to learn about all things. This drive trancends most ordinary drives to learn, however. She seeks to learn facts about the universe, like the scientists, yes. But itgoes beyond that for she seeks facts about the world and its people and how they interact, like the hackers. She even seeks to learn more about her own mind and how it works, why she thinks and feels the way she does like the mystics. And, like the psycholgists and the dreamers, she seeks to learn why others think and feel the way they do. She is very driven in this sense, ambitious for knowledge.But at the same time this hunger for knowledge is tempered by patience and, in a way, silence. She will not violate her notions of ethics or philosophy for the sake of quick learning or an easier path. In a way, her pursuit is very inwardly focused, rather then outwardly focused. This isn't to say she wouldn't like to make the world a better place, but she realizes that, in the end, someone who disagrees with her (or is a sleeper) has to -want- to become more enlightened. You can't force wisdom or even simple knowledge upon anyone. So while she does what she can for those she can, she also focuses on trying to improve herself, primarily. For what use is it to try and improve others or the world if one does not better themselves? Not that much of this comes across in her average, everyday interactions in the physical world, of course. Being a Virtual Adept, her 'real' personality and her inner thoughts and persona can be a bit different. In the meat, she can easily come across as shy and reserved. But when something is at stake, or when one has gotten to know her, or when she's in the Dreaming realms or Virtual World...well, then her actual personality tends to shine through more often then not. Expertises & Specialties Specialties: Intelligence: Creative Computer: Hacking Expertise: Science: Physics, Biology, Psychology Technology: Computers Lore: Dreaming Academics: Philosophy, Literature Merits & Flaws Flaws: Lifesaver - Victoria is very firm in her moral and philosophical principles. She makes a concerted effort to actually act in a way that lives up to what she has decided is right, and what she has decided is wrong. Therefore, she will not participate in senseless death and/or violence, and will attempt to protect Sleepers in her presence if it is at all possible for her to do so. She will not let a Sleeper die, be put at risk, or suffer for her moral beliefs if she can prevent this from happening, however, and thus will kill to protect the Sleepers, or those whom endanger them, barring only certain willfully ignorant/evil Sleepers whom are beyond the boundries of what one could term an innocent. She won't even necessarily kill to protect herself, preferring to find a way to disable such an opponent first, if possible. Merit: Force of Personality - Though Victoria can seem quiet, shy and reserved at times, especially in the physical world, when she does bring the weight of her drive and convictions to bear, she's hard to ignore, even if you disagree with her. Some people just have a sort of inner fire, and she's one of them. Merit: Code of Honor - Though the philisophical justifcations and minor details change depending on Victoria's current philosophical and ethical musings, in general Victoria does a rather rare thing, compared to most people. Namely, she attempts to actually live out her ethical beliefs, even if they are a hideous inconvienence to her, or would make her suffer in some way. This includes not shopping at Wal-mart, which most people wouldn't bother with, but also extends to things like not killing someone whose attacking her if she can disable them instead. She also doesn't break her given word, though she has no problem tricking or deceiving those that deserve it, if she makes a promise she'll stick to it. Note that despite her moral attitudes in other regards, such as life (see above), she still has a 'hacker morality', which is to say, you can steal information all you want because noone can own it, and doing things to free information, even if that would otherwise cause financial or property harm, isn't immoral as long as no real people or items get hurt. She's more reserved about stealing of 'physical' stuff, and probably wouldn't do it unless she had a good reason. But she has no problem destroying corporate computer systems, financial records, and so on, or waging wars of information and perception in the Digital Web. Neither does she have a problem 'hacking' into people's dreams or thoughts. Information, after all, is free and should be open to all. Paradigm Victoria's Paradigm has drastically changed since when she was first awakened. Her first paradigm was simple, really, and relatively akin to what most Virtual Adepts believe. Originally, she saw all of reality in terms of physics. Which is to say, the laws of physics are like the code of a computer program. The details of reality; rocks, trees, minds, stars, people...are like the specific code. Just endless data arrays written into the 'code' of the universe. So if everything is just data, you have to look at the world differently. Movement, for example, doesn't really exist. Its an illusion, a parameter of the operating system. When you walk, your changing your 'position', which is really just one bit of information in a very large array. Since information has no physical space, you've never really moved. You've just switched your position data. There's no such thing as a physical location, or even a physical body, just different types and ways to store information. Magic, therefore, works by hacking reality itself. Paradox is what happens when one deviates from the 'code' of reality enough to get a programming error. From reality. Which is to say, Bad Things Happen. That was her first paradigm. She sees it as relatively simplistic now, and after two Seekings (Arete 1 to Arete 2, Arete 2 to Arete 3), she's changed how she views things dramatically. Her first paradigm shift involved computers. Virtual Adepts are famous for their use of computers. They use them as tools, to help them visualize their magic, to interpret their magic, to alter the world around them, to interact with their "Reality 2.0" - the virtual world they've created for themselves as an alternative to the real one. And Victoria held to that too, for a time. More of which is detailed in her history. But eventually it changed, and she began to see physical computers as being unimaginably primitive compared to the ones Reality 1.0 had -already made-. Namely, the human brain. After all, many Adepts spend their time hoping and wishing and seeking the skills necessary to be elite enough to create an A.I. to run on their computers. But the human brain is far more powerful then any computer and already has a 'sentient operating system'. So if your going to try and hack reality, why not make use of the tools you already have? But Victoria couldn't just 'go out' and hack reality. She had no common basis with which to do so, and she knew it. She needed a tool, something to match her new insights into how the world worked. And then she realized that every Sleeper and Awakened, ever, have their own version of Reality 2.0, that they access all the time. They dream. And there were already tools which could allow anyone...even Sleepers...to awaken within their own dreams to control them. Victoria would learn to hack her own dreams, and through them, reshape Reality 1.0 in the same fashion most Adepts were trying to do with their Digital Web. And so her new Paradigm invovled training in meditation, lucid dreaming, psychology. Where once she had focused on physics, mathematics, biology, computer programming, now she had a more difficult task. She already knew science. She had to learn, from the ground up, an entirely different set of tools. But it was worth it; her mind was, clearly, one of the most powerful computers on the planet, and best of all, it was free. And so she began seeing dreams as being a sort of 'Reality 2.0' that the collective sleepers of the world created for themselves. By usind meditation, lucid dreaming, etc, she would 'Hack' that reality, joining the dreams of others in the same way she would once join near and distance computers. She would 'browse through the dataspace' of information available via people's dreams. In one sense, her paradigm hadn't changed at all. In another, she was now completly alien to her former bretheren. On the bright side, boy would they be confused when she told them what machine she was using to enter the Digital Web... The last paradigm shift she underwent was an extension of this. Rather then see dreams as 'merely' another virtual dataspace with which she could use the 'computer of her mind' to 'hack', she realized that, perhaps the dreams were the point of things, and not a tool. Her mind wasn't merely some "better computer" she had discovered, some great secret she alone knew and the rest of the Virtual Adepts had ignored. Exploring her own mind was its own end goal. The point of existence, or at least one of them, wasn't just exploration of distant Virtual Spaces or Dreamrealms, but charting the unknown possabilities of existence, considering things she had never considered before, exploring how her own mind worked and continuously freeing it from the boundaries and restrictions she had placed upon it. Avatar and Awakening Awakening: The awakening is literally that, for Victoria. Awakening all humans to the reality of their dreams. She works towards this primarily by seeking to understand herself, seeking ever-greater levels of personal enlightenment, since one cannot put out the mote in one's neighbors' eye without first addressing oneself. But she also does this by using her magics to 'connect' the dreams of dreamers whenever possible, in the same fashion one might network computers. She hopes to one day enable all sleepers to become lucid dreamers, so that they might then realize that there is no real firm difference between the waking world, and the dream world, in terms of what is more or less inherently real. Avatar: Backgrounds Explain all your backgrounds here, should they need a more in-depth explanation. History More stuff and talky things. Etc If you want you can add in things like playlist, or other character information here. Sheet Category:Character Concepts